All news stories become human-interest stories when a journalist writes them up to catch our attention, bringing in personalities, appearances, odd coincidences, details so vivid that they seem to have a life outside the truth. A close concern with the texture of reported news has led Gordon Burn to call his extraordinary compendium of the events of 2007 a novel.

Born Yesterday opens stylishly with a close encounter with Lady Thatcher in Battersea Park. The narrator reports his sightings of the “slightly crook-shouldered” elderly woman wearing an anonymous outfit, “full-length camel-hair coat [and] flat suede lace-up shoes of the kind you see advertised in colour supplements”. His identification of the former prime minister is confirmed by her habit of constantly pushing at the strap of a phantom handbag - a part of her former armoury that her minder-carers will not let her wear. The slightly sleazy atmosphere of the park, with its dog-walkers and kiosk staff, is evoked so convincingly that the reader forgets to question whether Thatcher really does go for such semi-secret expeditions.

Similar scrutiny is trained on Tony Blair in his too-tight Wrangler jeans at Camp David, on Gordon Brown's rumpled suits and uneasy smile, and on Jacqui Smith's unlikely choice of Morrisey's You Are the Quarry as her favourite album. Politicians deserve this scrutiny, Burn suggests, because they are involved in image-making, or, as Peter Mandelson once put it, “creating the truth”. Burn rounds up the facts on others in the news (Kate and Gerry McCann, Kate Middleton, have-a-go Glasgow baggage handler John Smeaton, and 16-year-old Abukar Mohammed, murdered in Stockwell in July 2007) and fingers others who happen to be spookily close to the newsworthy: Clarence Mitchell, the former News at Ten presenter who is now spokesman for the McCanns; Tanya Byron, the television psychologist and government advisor; and the well-connected Sir David Napley. Sometimes a bystander, such as the girl buying celebrity magazines and a lot of chocolate in a Chelsea supermarket (“early twenties, blonde, bad skin...probably bulimic”) comes briefly under observation. The pen portraits are supported by sharp-eyed inventories of places such as Myrobella (Blair's constituency home), the Mark Warner Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, and the West End nightclub Tiger, Tiger outside which a bomb exploded in June 2007. Burn's psychogeographical excursions are heavy with absence.

All this makes a portrait of Britain - a place of lowbrow television, MySpace, neets and paparazzi - during a shaky summer of terrorist bombs, floods and foot and mouth disease. Underpinning everything is a web of invisible links, actual and thematic, connecting those in the news, a mixture of gossip and innuendo and hidden messages: among them, the “slightly homosexual” flavour of the alliances between politicians (“Gordon and Tony. Tony and Peter. Gordon and Charlie. Ally and Tony. Gordon and Ed”), and the semiotics of the talks between George WBush and Brown.

Burn's forceful piled-up sentences, his movement between first- and third-person narratives, his killer quotations and his sudden swoops into dialect, slang and swearing make his vision of 2007 compelling. When he relaxes his brutal pressure on surfaces it is noticeable that his style loosens: the chapter on Damien Hirst's jewelled skull and his meditations on Madeleine McCann, without the fuelling rancour, are unfocused and slightly weird; the free-associating structure can feel uneasy when he writes about his narrator, a construct close to himself. Overall, however, as a report and as a piece of writing, Born Yesterday is original and disturbing. Perhaps this will be the form the novel of the future takes: a collection of hard bright pixels to replace the old first-person story that has up to now been fiction's badge of authenticity.

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel by Gordon Burn

Faber £7.99 pp224

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